97 Quotes by David Gerrold

Most people say they want justice, but they don’t really want justice. They want revenge. They want to see the pain spread around equally.

I have memories – but only a fool stores his past in the future.

I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.

To say that a writer’s hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it’s like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer’s build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

Imagine yourself in the scene. See what there is to be seen. Listen to the sounds. Touch the world. Smell the air. Taste it. Use all of your senses. Then evoke those experiences for the reader. If you give the audience the flavor, they’ll flesh out the moment in their own imaginations.

Morality – like velocity – is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one’s position in relation to them; never can one measure one’s velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.

When I was a kid, my favorite movies were the George Pal version of ‘War Of The Worlds,’ ‘Them,’ and ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ Those movies were scary! They haunted my nightmares for years, so when I started writing, I wanted to write a story that was just as big and just as scary.

Star Trek was about social justice from day one – the stories were about the human pursuit for a better world, a better way of being, the next step up the ladder of sentience. The stories weren’t about who we were going to fight, but who we were going to make friends with. It wasn’t about defining an enemy – it was about creating a new partnership. That’s why when Next Gen came along, we had a Klingon on the bridge.

It’s almost always dangerous to be right too soon.